Haptic feedback, which sends touch pulses into your fingertips, has been heavily used in game controllers. But now a division of Germany’s Bayer has developed a touch-feedback technology that can enhance the way you hear things as well.

Launch.it, a New York City-based startup that has built a platform for managing and distributing news, has been tapped to power the onslaught of news coming from startups at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

Last year, Steve Ballmer delivered Microsoft’s last CES keynote. Now the Consumer Electronics Association has announced his successor: Qualcomm’s chairman and chief executive Dr. Paul Jacobs. And it has confirmed that Microsoft will have a dramatically reduced role at the show.

Connected TV was front and center at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month: Panasonic, LG, and Sharp all shone spotlights on Internet-enabled televisions, along with just about every other TV manufacturer. MySpace even decided to resurrect itself at CES as a social-TV experience. With all of the articles, press events, parties, celebrity sightings and sheer volume of tech TV news, the full picture of “connected TV” could be easy to miss.

Alan Wake was a high-potential game that didn’t sell as well as expected in 2010. Critics said that the story was great, but the game play of the psychological thriller title was mediocre. Amid rivals such as the spectacular western Red Dead Redemption, which came out at the same time, Alan Wake got a lukewarm reception. With a new downloadable game coming, the question at hand for Alan Wake is whether the franchise can make a comeback.

Synaptics showed off how touch controls will change in the next year at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Synaptics has a big market share in touch application hardware and it showed off its latest products at the show.

App maker SkyGrid has a plan to bring TV to your iPad. It’s also landed a promising partnership with huge Korean electronics maker LG to integrate its app technology into tens of millions of televisions.

Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of little more than a spool of wire and some electricity? It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the MakerBot offers levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

More than any other time in the history of the Consumer Electronics Show, car manufacturers showed up in full force to last week’s show in Las Vegas — a major sign that cars are going high tech this year.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, everybody wanted to talk. And when they talked on their mobile phones, they put a great deal of stress on the mobile phone carriers. We tried to figure out who handled the load the best.